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JOHN FISKE 

BY 

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JOHN FISKE 



THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY 








BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

MCMVI 



Copyright^ igo^^ by 
Small^ Maynard & Company 

{Incorporated) 



Entered at Stationers' Hall 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Roceived 

DEC 8 1905 

Copyriffht £nJry 
CLASS CK. XXC. No. 

/ 3 3 ^ / d 

COPY B. 






Press of 

George H. Ellis Company 
Boston^ U.S.J. 



The portrait used as a frontispiece to this 
volume is from a photogravure copyrighted 
by Lea Brothers & Company for their 
•7 worTcy "A History of All J^ations,^^ to 
i which Mr. Fiske contributed. The original 
2 photograph was taJcen by Fach Brothers^ 
T Cambridge, in 1891. The present engrav- 
ing is by John Andrew & Son^ Boston. 



JOHN FISKE 



JOHN FISKE. 



The life of a man of letters is like a 
voyage : that is the most successful in 
which the least happens. Other men we 
study in their actions, but the philoso- 
pher is at his best in contemplating the 
vicissitudes of others rather than in 
meeting thrilling adventures of his own. 
Like the majority of mankind, the 
writer lives in a corner remote from ex- 
ceptional events, studying life as it is 
reflected in books ; and his biography is 
not a list of heroic deeds. When others 
are conquering savage races or, more 
probably, watching the w^hirling inci- 
dents of the stock exchange, he is quietly 
reading the printed page. Yet no man 
has lived even this inglorious life with- 
out at least abundant opportunity to 
show various virtues, — endurance, per- 
sistence ; and even a writer's life may 
not be without its lesson and encourage- 



2 JOHN FISKE 

inent for others. The life of a man like 
John Fiske certainly has its place in the 
history of the intellect. The part that 
he took in unfolding modern thought to 
his fellow-countrymen was of distinct 
significance ; and, although newly won 
truths become as uninteresting as a 
solved puzzle and soon fade into 
platitudes, the way they were won is, 
perhaps, not without interest. It will 
be well if other generations have for 
their leaders men as sincere, as honest, 
and as learned as John Fiske. 

The task which he essayed was to 
teach the principle of evolution. He 
was one of the first to grasp the mean- 
iug of this movement, which was of 
so great importance in widening men's 
interests and in enlarging their view 
of the universe ; and he devoted him- 
self to teaching the new doctrine with 
great enthusiasm. Like every new doc- 
trine, this one met with opposition. It 
was felt that the spirit which preached 



JOHIT FISKE 3 

that things grow was an irreverent and 
basely destructive perversion of the be- 
lief that things were created. It seemed 
to be a wicked assault upon the privi- 
leges of omnipotence. Modern history 
is made up of these misunderstandings. 
One year, it is Copernicanism ; another, 
geology makes trouble. After evolution 
comes what is called the higher criticism, 
and there is no peace ; and we avenge 
ourselves for the discomfort of being 
made to think by abusing the man who 
introduces the new thoughts, and Fiske 
did not escape this common lot. In 
comparison with the discomfort of the 
thumb-screw, the foolish tattle of the 
ignorant or even the insolent interfer- 
ence of the wise is of course as nothing j 
but he tasted the modern, civilized form 
of persecution in misunderstanding and 
abuse, though this was but an incident 
in his life. Before he died, he had be- 
come one of the most widely known men 
in America and one of the most highly 



4 JOHN FISKE 

esteemed. His career was a successfal 
one, in intellectual matters at least, and 
his life seemed still full of promise up to 
the moment of its close. By what steps 
did he attain this honourable promi- 
nence ? 

John Fiske was born in Hartford, 
Connecticut, March 30, 1842. His 
father, Edmund Brewster Green, of 
Delaware, was a newspaper editor in 
Hartford, New York, and finally in 
Panama where he died in 1852. He 
was descended from some Philadelphia 
Quakers. On his mother's side he was 
descended from a Puritan family, the 
Fiskes, who emigrated from Suffolk to 
Massachusetts in 1641, and went to Con- 
necticut in 1693. The name given to 
him was Edmund Fiske Green, but on 
the occasion of Mrs. Green's second 
marriage to the late Edwin W. 
Stoughton he took the name of his great- 
grandfather, John Fiske. Before he 
was a year old, he was taken to Middle- 



JOHN FISKE 5 

town, Connecticut, and there he lived in 
the family of his grandmother Fiske 
until he entered Harvard College in 
1860. He was the only child in the 
house, and the surroundings were pos- 
sibly very sedate j but there was a sup- 
ply of solid books, and with these he 
made friends as soon as he had learned 
to read. ' ^ At seven he had read Eollin, 
Josephus, and Goldsmith's Greece. Be- 
fore he was eight, he had read the whole 
of Shakespeare, a good deal of Milton, 
Bunyan, and Pope. By eleven he had 
read Gibbon, Robertson, Prescott, and 
most of Froissart. He was very fond 
of drawing maps, and read history with 
maps almost from the first. '^ So much 
Mr. Edwin D. Mead tells us in one of 
his interesting articles in the Christian 
Begister for 1888. 

It was not history alone that he read 
with maps of his own make ; he drew 
with extreme pains a map of Christian's 
Progress as recounted by Bunyan. In a 



6 JOHN FISKE 

word, lie must have been most distinctly 
what is vaguely called an old-fashioned 
child. ^^He committed hundreds of 
dates to memory for the pleasure of 
getting subjects fixed in his mind in an 
orderly way. At eleven he wrote from 
memory a chronological table from B.C. 
1000 to A.D. 1820, filling a quarto blank 
book of sixty pages. He mentions in his 
essay on 'The Causes of Persecution' 
that he recollects coming to blows, when 
quite a little boy, with a schoolmate 
over the question whether Kapoleon 
really won the battle of Eylau. . . . His- 
tory and mathematics were his first 
loves. He began algebra at eight, and 
by thirteen had gone through Euclid, 
plane and spherical trigonometry, sur- 
veying and navigation and analytic 
geometry, and well into the differential 
calculus. ^^ These facts which Mr. Mead 
chronicles came straight from Fiske^s 
lips, so that they are practically a bit 
of autobiography, — indeed, all that we 



JOHK FISKE 7 

have. They show on what solid foun- 
dations his learning rested, and how 
early and zealously he began his lifelong 
task of study. The foundations, too, 
were broad as well as deep. He began 
the study of Latin at six, and at seven 
was reading Csesar. '^At thirteen he 
had read the whole of Virgil, Horace, 
Tacitus, Sallust, and Suetonius, and 
much of Livy, Cicero, 0\ad, Catullus, 
and Juvenal. He began Greek at nine, 
and at twelve had read most of the 
Collectanea Groeca Majora with the aid 
of Schrevelius's lexicon, which defines 
the Greek in Latin." 

This lexicon he found meagre and con- 
fusing, and he longed for the Liddell and 
Scott which more efficiently smoothed 
the path of the student ; but its price, 
five dollars, seemed to his prudent 
grandmother a monstrous one to give 
for so useless a luxury, and she declined 
to pay it. The young lover of learning 
accordingly set forth to earn the money 



8 JOHK FISKE 

for Mmself. '^ He learned that an Irisli- 
man in the neighbourhood would buy 
old bones at 37 cents a barrel. So he 
picked up bones here and there until 
he had got five barrels, which brought 
him $1.85. In other ways he increased 
this fund to $3.40; when his grand- 
mother, seeing his determination, fur- 
nished the remainder of the $5,'^ and 
thus he became the happy owner of the 
lexicon. 

A certain amount of Latin and Greek 
had to be read by all boys at that time 
who were intending to go to college, but 
this modest amount Fiske had far ex- 
ceeded from sheer love of study ; and to 
these acquirements he added the knowl- 
edge of many modern languages. He 
learned by himself German, French, 
Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. '^He 
began Hebrew at seventeen, and took 
up Sanskrit the next year. During 
his college years he added Icelandic, 
Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and 



JOH]^ FISKE 9 

Eoumanian, and made a beginning in 
Russian.'^ With these acquisitions he 
was naturally led to the study of Com- 
parative Philology, then beginning to 
establish itself as a science. Other and 
better-known sciences he studied atten- 
tively in the works of their leaders. He 
began to read books of philosophy. 

He was also interested in music, and 
deeply interested. As a boy, he sang in 
the village choir ,* and ^^ when he was fif- 
teen a friend's piano happened to be 
left in the house, and he was allowed 
to use it.'' He felt his way without a 
teacher until he acquired considerable 
proficiency. Later he made a thorough 
study of music, which became one of 
his chief interests and relaxations. 

To complete the story of his boyhood, 
it must be said that at the age of 
fourteen he ^^experienced religion," he 
even led in prayer-meetings and taught 
in the Sunday-school, but of this inci- 
dent in his life we know only the bare 



10 JOHN FISKE 

fact. We do know, however, that the 
enthusiasm, if ardent, was not long- 
lived. It enabled him to listen atten- 
tively to the sermons in the little coun- 
try church, but, when in one of them he 
was told that the greatest joy of the 
elect in heaven would be listening to 
the wails of their less fortunate friends 
below, his soul revolted against that 
sour and harsh theology, and he began 
to lay the foundation of his endur- 
ing reputation for atheism by avoiding 
the church where such dogmas were 
preached. Freedom of thought, we 
may be sure, was not highly esteemed in 
that Connecticut village, and at no time 
in his life did Fiske try to smooth over 
his divergence from public opinion. 
When this concerned itself with a mat- 
ter of religion, a ready punishment was 
at hand in calling him an atheist. 

His many studies and occupations left 
him, one would suppose, only very little 
time for exercise and amusement, but he 



JOHK FISKE 13 

unwieldy, but this was not the case with 
Fiske. His mind was robust enough to 
assimilate and to command what his 
wide interests enabled him to acquire. 
The incident of the note-book crammed 
with dates illustrates his love of an 
orderly sequence of facts. 

There is one characteristic of this 
wide and in its way thorough educa- 
tion that must not be forgotten: that is 
its literary quality. It was made up 
from books : what he knew of science 
was learned from text-books, not from 
actual handling or direct study of the 
elements. This was not the result of 
Fiske' s choice of methods: it is merely 
the way in which, when he was young, 
the sciences were taught. Thus the 
general student's notion of, let us say, 
a problem in chemistry was as vague 
and impersonal as of one in algebra : 
the incidents were recounted in a book, 
this or that was supposed to happen with 
a curious shufle of capital letters which 



14 JOHIsT FISKE 

one had to learn by heart. Astronomy 
was taught in the same way, — one learned 
interesting statistics from a book, and yet 
besides the sun and moon knew only the 
north star, — and so with other sciences. 
There was this advantage, however: that 
much that was so taught has since been 
proved wholly wrong, so that those 
who were then slack in their studies 
have had so much the less to unlearn. 
But this is beside the question, which is 
the exaggerated value at that time of the 
printed page. This had so long been 
the sole medium of instruction that it in- 
spired a reverence which it did not always 
deserve. Certainly the chemistry, for 
instance, that one can learn in a library 
is very different from that one can learn 
in a laboratory. This is not saying that 
there is no value in books, true as that 
remark may be about many, but only 
that we must recognize a difference be- 
tween the period of Fiske's youth and the 
present in respect of educational methods. 



JOHN FISKE 15 

In his case the knowledge he acquired 
of these remote sciences was of the 
nature of information, as one knows a 
country he has read about, but has not 
seen. 

What has been recounted of the prog- 
ress of his studies makes it clear that the 
usual preparation for college was some- 
thing that he had early attained. When 
only thirteen, he was ready to enter Yale 
College, so far at least as familiarity with 
the requirements was concerned; but he 
was able to persuade his guardians to 
postpone this threatening interruption 
to his studies, and then to go to Harvard 
rather than to Yale. 

What decided him was the reputation 
that Cambridge enjoyed for possessing a 
liberal atmosphere. It was supposed in 
remote regions that the Unitarianism of 
this college town insured perfect freedom 
for any thinker, and that it detested 
persecution as the persecuted alone can 
do. Such freedom the young thinker 



16 JOHN FISKE 

yearned for. As has been said, he had 
by this time, with his reading, wandered 
away from the tenets of the little Middle- 
town church, and he expected to find in 
Cambridge a place where he could work 
as he pleased with congenial companions. 
He appears to have been disappointed, 
for the college seemed to him ^ ^ a terrible 
den of old fogyism.^* He said that he 
owed it nothing but the friendships he 
made there. Indirectly, however, it 
offered him a chance to pursue his own 
solitary studies without interruption, 
and of this opportunity he made the 
most. 

A student who studied was, in those 
dark days, an object of great wonder 
and suspicion among his fellows. Eu- 
mours ran through the college of the 
enormous amount of reading done by 
the tall, gaunt, pallid young man with 
the great shock of red hair and the gold 
spectacles. It was also whispered, pos- 
sibly as a perfectly unnecessary warning 



JOHK FISKE 17 

against undue devotion to study, that 
the unhappy youth was an atheist. 
This evil fame clung to him for many 
years, and indeed had a distinct influence 
on his career, for it is true that some 
may rob the orchard, while others may 
not look over the hedge. 

If a writer may with exaggerated 
modesty regard anything he has writ- 
ten as unread, place may perhaps be 
found here for an incident in Fiske^s 
college career recounted in the Atlantic 
Monthly for May, 1902: ^^t will be re- 
membered that until recently all the 
students of Harvard College were re- 
quired, under severe penalties, to attend 
church twice every Sunday, — a rule 
which in their opinion sadly embit- 
tered the day. Fiske, who was averse 
to losing so much time, though he neces- 
sarily complied with the law, carried a 
book to church, and was detected in 
reading it. When charged with this 
crime, he readily acknowledged his 



18 JOHN FISKE 

guilt, but at once complicated the ques- 
tion by a misplaced appeal to the lib- 
erality which he supposed to underlie 
an austere mien. He imagined that 
since Harvard College, as a fountain of 
Unitarianism, was regarded throughout 
the country as lamentably unorthodox, 
his offense would be readily pardoned 
by fellow free-thinkers. Greatly to his 
surprise, nothing of the sort happened; 
the authorities refused to wink at this 
bit of sacrilege. They displayed the ut- 
most orthodoxy, and indignantly dis- 
owned any sympathy with Sabbath- 
breakers. He barely escaped rustica- 
tion, and all he got from his appeal 
was his evil reputation as an atheist.'^ 

His bad luck with this nickname was 
also partly a result of the swift condem- 
nation of the new thought which threat- 
ened so many old-fashioned ways of 
looking at the world that it was soon 
judged to be godless, and it was but a 
short step to call its adherents atheists. 



JOHN FISKE 19 

Then, too, Fiske's absolute frankness 
and outspokenness attracted especial at- 
tention among a timid people like the 
Americans, who, above all things, dread 
any infraction of rigid conventionality 
and are shocked by the expression of 
individual opinion. The fact that he 
was no atheist was perfectly immaterial. 
He boldly and clearly asserted opinions 
that shocked the ignorant by their sup- 
posed blasphemy and the wise by their 
assumed inappropriateness. He did not 
play the game with the secrecy with 
which it was thought that the game 
should be played. In fact, he did not 
play any game. The average man 
would have assumed the appearance of 
conformity, but then he would not have 
been John Fiske. 

It cannot be said that his college 
years were embittered by these idle ac- 
cusations. He entered Harvard College 
in the summer of 1860, and graduated 
in the class of 1863, without academic 



20 JOHN FISKE 

honors, but with a good preparation 
for more important ones. Already as 
an undergraduate he began to write, 
his early work appearing in the now 
vanished National Quarterly Review , 
the North American^ and the Atlantic 
Monthly. 



II. 

After leaving college, Fiske entered 
the Law School, which he left with the 
degree of Bachelor of Laws in 1865. 
He then entered a lawyer's office in 
Boston, and soon opened an office of 
his own. He was not, however, of the 
stuff of which chancellors are made. 
The loneliness of the young lawyer's 
office, it is to be feared, was most wel- 
come to him as a secure retreat from 
interruption, and it was perhaps with a 
groan that he heard the knock of his 
first and only client. He was successful 
in the case, and received a fee for his work 
which set the legal profession in a far 
more alluring light than the scantily re- 
warded pursuit of literature. But his 
mind was made up : he turned his back 
on law, and determined to support him- 
self with his pen. The importance of 
this decision was intensified by the fact 
that he had married while still in the 



22 JOHK FISKE 

Law School, and was now a father. 
With all respect for an honourable pro- 
fession, it may be said that one lawyer 
more or less is a matter of little moment 
to the world at large. There are al- 
ways well-trained, intelligent, and eager 
young men ready to carry on the work 
of law, but there is a singularly small 
number of competent writers. At any 
rate, Fiske exercised a free choice, and 
gave up a profession that, if not odious, 
was at least unattractive to him, to de- 
vote himself to what was his real task, 
and one for which he was exceptionally 
well fitted. He lived his own life, but 
there were more than moments when he 
must have felt able to serve as a warn- 
ing to young men who are disposed to 
despise the worldly wisdom of their 
elders. 

With the intention, then, of conquer- 
ing the world with his pen, Fiske settled 
down in Cambridge to the hard work 
that this perilous scheme demanded. 



JOHN FISKE 23 

Some of the fruits of these early days 
may be found among his collected essays. 
Thus the article on ^^Mr. Buckle's Fal- 
lacies, ' ' which is reprinted in Darwinism 
and Other Essays, had appeared in 1861, 
when Fiske was but nineteen years old ; 
and it was certainly a very noteworthy 
piece of work for a writer of that age. 
His youth shows itself perhaps most 
clearly in the occasional solemnity to 
which Fiske never quite grew up, and 
in a little unnecessary loudness of affirma- 
tion ; but such things are trifles. What 
he clearly manifested was a good pre- 
paration for the handling of large sub- 
jects and a very competent mastery of 
the art of writing, as well as a remark- 
able maturity of mind. The discussion 
of Buckle's theories was the work of a 
ripe thinker. The many essays that 
Fiske wrote at this time only confirm 
this favourable opinion. They show wide 
reading — and the reading of a burro wer, 
not of a skimmer — and trained thought. 



24 JOHN FISKE 

All those years of careful study had 
filled his mind with a great mass of 
knowledge : there was hardly a sub- 
ject of study that he had not investi- 
gated, and many of them he knew well. 
One might say that his special interest 
was in philology and folk-lore, were it 
not that he was planning a large book 
upon Jesus of Nazareth and the found- 
ing of Christianity. With these plans 
and distractions for his lighter hours, he 
was busily preparing the magnum opus 
of that part of his life, his Outlines of 
Cosmic Philosophy, which finally appeared 
in 1874. 

It had been long preparing. In 1860, 
in May, Fiske had made acquaintance 
with the writings of Herbert Spencer, 
and in them and in Darwin's Origin 
of 8pecies he saw the new light which 
filled him with rapture. He felt that 
he was one step, and one long step, 
nearer the comprehension of the uni- 
verse. The application of this benefi- 



JOHN FISKE 25 

cent illumination was to be made in 
various ways : its methods and signifi- 
cance were to be set forth in this Philoso- 
phy. In 1869 Fiske gave a series of 
lectures on Positive Philosophy at Har- 
vard College, in which he expressed his 
dissatisfaction with that guess at the 
mystery of things. To the outer public 
who did not hear the lectures, and did 
not read them when they were later 
published in the Xew York World, a 
paper which at that time looked at life 
with an unjaun diced eye and actually so 
far forgot the functions of a newspaper 
as to interest itself in thought, — to this 
public, positivist, materialist, evolution- 
ist, were but slightly varying terms of 
opprobrium for the dangerous free- 
thinker. Fiske was, they thought, a 
positivist, or, if that were inexact, he 
was all three, which was worse. At any 
rate, by treating of forbidden subjects 
he became an object of suspicion to 
those whose orthodoxy was firm. The 



26 JOHN FISKE 

lectures on Positivism were followed by 
a longer series of thirty-five lectures on 
the Doctrine of Evolution, which were 
afterwards expanded into his book on 
the Cosmic Philosophy. They, too, ap- 
peared in the New York World. This 
was in 1871. 

In 1870 he held a temporary appoint- 
ment in Harvard College as instructor 
in history, and he received a regular 
nomination for the place j but in the 
Board of Overseers, which in such mat- 
ters is generally compliant, his name 
excited sudden and violent opposition. 
What ! an atheist, a positivist, a ma- 
terialist, to be made one of the instructors 
of Harvard College ! Are we to hand 
over our young men, at the most sus- 
ceptible age, to insidious and dangerous 
sophists, who will misread history and 
teach heresy? etc., etc. The occasion, 
it will be seen, lends itself to eloquence ; 
and eloquence of this sort carried the 
day. Fiske's nomination was rejected. 



JOHN FISKE 27 

It was an extraordinary exhibition of 
the way in which men, chosen by picked 
voters, discharge what they imagine to 
be their duty. Their performance would 
seem strange, were it not that such things 
happen all the time. 

This twinge of virtue was a heavy 
blow to Fiske, whose acquirements and 
ability were above the average, and who 
would gladly have devoted his life and 
vast power of work to teaching. It was 
a heavier blow to the college. No man 
was ever born with a greater power of 
imparting what he knew than John 
Fiske. His power of acquiring knowl- 
edge was considerable, and it is not to 
the credit of any man or of any body of 
men that a teacher of this calibre should 
be the one chosen for rejection. There 
is, however, this consolation : time brings 
its revenge, — slowly, to be sure, but not 
so slowly when one considers what calls 
are made upon it ; and, though at the 
moment they occur incidents like this 



28 JOHN FISKE 

are depressing, they appear later simply 

ridiculous. 

A year later, in 1872, it was thought 
that Fiske, now safely muzzled, might 
be made assistant librarian of Harvard 
College ; and this post he held until 1879, 
cataloguing and classifying books, — a 
most useful task, which he describes in 
his essay, ^^A Librarian's Work.'' A 
merely captious person, as distinguished 
from a practical man, might say that this 
was a singular misuse of Fiske' s abilities. 
The library was, however, lucky in hav- 
ing for consultation his great fund of 
information. 



III. 

Meanwhile Outlines of Cosmic Fhiloso- 
phy had been put into shape and pub- 
lished. There are those in Cambridge 
who still remember one incident con- 
nected with its appearance. A number 
of the author's friends agreed to meet 
Fiske to discuss with him the principles 
that he had set forth in the two stout 
volumes, and one evening saw them as- 
sembled. They were all philosophers, 
and we know how philosophers regard 
the systems of their rivals. We know, 
too, the tender solicitude of even those 
of us who are not philosophers for the 
errors of our neighbours, and it is not 
difficult to imagine the scene. The dis- 
cussion went on for some time : each one 
of the little band gave full expression to 
his opinion of the book and of what a 
philosophic system really should be, and 
at last, when they had conscientiously 
said their say, they turned to Fiske to 



30 JOHl^ FISKE 

hear what defence he might make. To 
their surprise the object of all these at- 
tentions had no answer to make. He 
was sound asleep, and had not heard a 
word of their criticisms. 

This book was of course Fiske's great 
contribution to philosophy. Any one 
who reads it now for the first time should 
not fail to study it along with Professor 
Eoyce's wise and sympathetic commen- 
tary in the complete edition of Fiske's 
works. The book is an exposition of 
what was then the new philosophy of 
evolution, and it began with overthrow- 
ing foes now dead and decorously buried, 
and it laboured to establish principles 
now generally acknowledged. Investi- 
gation has gone further, correcting, mod- 
ifying, enlarging various points of view. 
Books of this sort are more or less like 
old editions of encyclopaedias : they re- 
quire making over every few years. A 
later revision Fiske never found time to 
give to this work of his youth, which in 



JOHN FISKE 31 

its time had served a most useful pur- 
pose in teaching a large number of peo- 
ple what at least some leaders of thought 
were thinking and doing. The world 
was eager to know what was this evil 
spirit abroad, modifying the way of 
looking at the universe ; and they found 
here a most lucid and intelligible expo- 
sition of what they wanted to know. 
Nor was this all. The book is not a 
mere interpretation of Spencer's philos- 
ophy for the American public, a mere 
rehash of that and Darwinism. Fiske 
was not a mere translator : he illumi- 
nated the subject in a thousand ways, 
and contributed to it at least one mark- 
edly important suggestion in his theory 
of the influence which prolonged infancy 
exercised upon social development. A 
mind like Fiske's could not turn to a 
subject without bringing some new in- 
formation or new way of regarding it. 

That the book should have outlived 
its first importance is only natural. It 



32 JOHN FISKE 

would be something strange if the world 
had made no advance in any given 
matter in a generation; for it is now 
more than thirty years since the book 
appeared^ and many things have been 
discovered in that time, new thoughts 
have had their birth. 

Those who are born in houses equipped 
with telephones, lit by electricity, can 
have but a feeble understanding of the 
joy felt by their fathers when they 
began to apprehend the full significance 
of the notion of evolution. That things 
grow without calling in the aid of 
special creation seems nowadays more 
than sufQciently obvious, but the exten- 
sion of this new thought beyond the 
narrow limits of the kitchen-garden cost 
the world a mighty pang. The new 
lesson explained and simplified so many 
things. It brought order where had 
been confusion. The world unrolled it- 
self in a new harmony as one vast whole. 
Every reformer feels the enthusiasm 



JOHK FISKE 33 

which this new vision inspired. At last 
ignorance and superstition were to be ex- 
pelled for good and all, everything was 
to be for the best in the best of worlds. 
The leaders of the Eenaissance, those 
who greeted the beginning of the French 
Eevolution as the foundation of a new 
era, had already known this strange en- 
thusiasm, which is probably the greatest 
joy that the world knows. It is all 
very well to be young, but one cannot 
be too careful to be young at the right 
time. 

The moment for the future Faust to 
catch is that when he sees the movement 
beginning, vast and full of promise, be- 
fore it has been too closely examined 
under the microscope, tested in annoy- 
ing and disconcerting ways by captious 
critics for whom nothing is good enough. 
In the days when Fiske wrote his book 
it seemed as if there were no good that 
would not flow from evolution, with the 
possible exception of wealth. Certainly, 



34 joh:n- fiske 

no one foresaw then that now one of its 
favourite lessons would be the notion that 
might is right, and that it is simply our 
duty to bully those weaker than our- 
selves. This result of the teachings of 
evolution was not perceived by the 
early disciples, who saw ahead of them 
nothing but the uninterrupted perform- 
.ance of acts of altruism. They beheld 
only the glow of the dawn, and actually 
imagined that the great, cruel, stupid 
world was really taking a stride for- 
ward ! This optimism is seen in all of 
Fiske' s writings from the first page to 
the last. It was one source of his great 
influence, for every one likes a cheerful 
guide ; and the man who believes that 
he is getting ahead covers more ground 
than one who growls in despair. By dis- 
position Fiske was an optimist, and this 
way of looking at things was confirmed 
by the study of evolution in its fascinat- 
ing novelty. He felt and preached the 
great charm of believing that some- 



JOHI!^^ FISKE 35 

thing great was in process of accom- 
plishment. 

Even the most rabid optimist, how- 
ever, can scarcely maintain that America 
counts among its boundless opportuni- 
ties for the acquisition of riches the 
writing of books on philosophy. The 
establishment of a new religion has been 
shown to be not only very easy, but 
also a very lucrative business ; but the 
^'boom" still holds aloof from philoso- 
phy, which has to content itself with 
singing the charms of poverty. More- 
over, when the philosopher has told us 
what he thinks, he has, as it were, shot 
his bolt. It can hardly be expected of 
him that he should sit down and devise 
a new system, — the philosopher next 
door will do that, — and his own system 
we have every opportunity of knowing. 
Fiske, then, had made his profession of 
faith. He had shown the way in which 
mankind might be expected to think, 
and why it should so think. There 



36 JOHN FISKE 

seemed nothing more for him to say on 

that subject. 

The Cosmic FMlosophy was well re- 
ceived. It made Fiske's name well 
known at home and abroad, and found 
readers and admirers in all classes, from 
stray students in remote regions of 
this country to Huxley, Darwin, and 
Spencer in England. The acquaintance 
of these distinguished men he had al- 
ready made in 1873-74 during a visit 
to Europe which he undertook for the 
purpose of making over his lectures into 
the book that we know. 



lY. 

After the publication of Cosmic Phi- 
losophy, although, as we have seen, there 
appeared to be nothing more to say on 
philosophy, the world was not empty 
to Fiske. He wrote on various subjects 
as circumstances suggested, and found 
himself gradually drifting towards his- 
tory. This had long been a favourite 
study of his. Indeed, it may be said to 
have been the study of his lifetime. 
In 1878 he was asked by that excellent 
woman, Mrs. Augustus Hemenway, his 
good friend and admirer, to give six 
lectures on American History in the Old 
South Meeting-house in Boston, where, 
partly under the influence of the recent 
centennial celebration of the events of 
1776, an effort was making for a wiser 
study of our brief past. It was a 
moment when the whole nation was 
called upon to consider the growth of 
the last hundred years, and this period 



38 JOHN FISKE 

of examination coincided with a dis- 
tinct epoch in the economic history of 
the country, when, to state it roughly, 
luxury began to be common, if not 
vulgar, and, what was even more im- 
portant, the United States of America 
began to assume importance among 
nations, ceasing to be a very respectable 
but remote and unimportant province. 
This was naturally the time when 
our past history that bore so agree- 
able fruit was the object of renewed 
interest. 

Very naturally, then, Fiske was drawn 
into writing on American history, and 
the title of his first book on this subject, 
American Folitical Ideas Viewed from the 
Standpoint of Universal History, shows 
us how he regarded it. The book is of 
a most interesting kind, and the lectures 
which composed it were heard with 
delight whenever they were given. 
What characterised them was Fiske' s 
wide knowledge and wise intelligence 



JOHN FISKE 39 

as well as the perfect lucidity of his 
treatment. It is tiresome to be forever 
sayiug this of Fiske's work, but the 
fault is his: he was always learned and 
always clear. 

The lectures were given in London, in 
the theatre of University College, in 
June, 1879, by invitation of Huxley 
and other distinguished Englishmen. 
They were very successful ; and the next 
year he was summoned again to London 
to repeat them at the Eoyal Institution, 
where they were heard by larger and 
even more enthusiastic audiences. I 
remember telling Fiske, when I heard 
them in Boston, that one of them, the 
second, was the best lecture I had ever 
heard. He said, ''Huxley told me it 
was the best lecture he had ever heard 
at the Eoyal Institution," and went on 
to tell me what efforts he had made to 
satisfy his audience. Later he told me 
how very well they had been satisfied, 
how the audience rose, some one pro- 



40 JOHN FISKE 

posed cheers and more cheers, and there 

was general delight. 

The lectures were also delivered at 
the Philosophical Institution of Edin- 
burgh, again in London, and Fiske was 
Invited to read them at the Sor bonne; 
but the season was late, and he was 
obliged to return to America, full of 
confidence. He had made a most au- 
spicious beginning. 

The field which Fiske began to treat 
in this brilliant way had not been left 
wholly untouched by writers. The 
glories of American history, the virtues 
of the American people, had been sung 
until modesty seemed to be the only one 
that was wanting. Faults were judged 
with equal impartiality. Those of the 
English were impressed with painful 
iteration upon the minds of all school 
children, to sweeten their lives with 
international hatred, — as if patriotism 
could exist only at the expense of rea- 
son. Such at least were the qualities of 



JOHN FISKE 41 

many of tlie text- books that formed the 
basis of the general knowledge of our 
history. In Fiske's work there was no 
such narrowness. His knowledge was 
so abundant that the growth of the 
American people appeared in its right 
proportion as an incident in the world's 
history. For the reader there was 
something very flattering in finding with 
what important events he was con- 
nected, as if he suddenly found himself 
related to some old and famous family. 
What had been accomplished lost no 
interest and no merit by the explana- 
tion of the causes that led to it. The 
incidents were woven into a larger web, 
and so acquired a new importance which 
had not been before suspected. 

Fiske's inspiring optimism delighted 
readers, and filled them with his own 
confidence. All the past was but the 
introduction to a far more glorious 
future. The last of the lectures in 
American Folitical Ideas, for instance^ 



42 JOHN FISKE 

reads and sounded like a speech at some 
great dinner: one expects a brass band 
to burst in with some patriotic song and 
a general tumult of cheers. This, to 
be sure, is an exceptional case, the 
tone is so clearly that of an address; 
but in his most sedate moments we see 
how unfailing is Fiske's cheery confi- 
dence in the future. He never doubted 
for a moment that everything would 
turn out for the best. That is what 
readers like. The novelist who brings 
his story to a happy end is the one they 
prefer, and they rejoice in the encourage- 
ment with which the optimist fills them. 
They smile perhaps at the petulance of 
the cynic, but, since mankind notoriously 
is seldom moved by reason and always 
by emotion, they pay attention only to 
the optimist whose words are like music 
to them. The main service of pessi- 
mism seems to be in inspiring remorse, 
which, besides being rare, is one of the 
least useful of human emotions. Fiske's 



joh:n^ fiske 43 

nature was made up of the most ad- 
mirable serenity, which looked steadily 
on the bright side of things. This dis- 
position shows through all his life and 
through all his work. We have seen 
it in his Cosmic Philosophy: it is even 
more conspicuous in his histories. 

Of course, his hopefulness was far re- 
moved from that abnegation of reason 
which is known as jingoism. The jingo 
is necessarily an ignorant person ; and, if 
nothing else had preserved him from 
this folly, his knowledge would have 
done so. But from such imaginary 
charges Fiske does not need to be de- 
fended. 

The American Political Ideas, while 
not precisely a history, showed in what 
lines history might be written, and how 
competent Fiske was to undertake the 
task. The popularity of the lectures 
made evident the eagerness of the pub- 
lic to listen to his expounding of the 
subject, which under his treatment was 



44 JOHK FISKE 

interesting and full of instruction. Ex- 
actly in what way lie should begin was 
a matter of some uncertainty. At one 
time he thought of compressing what he 
had to say into one volume, like Green's 
Short History of the English Feople^ then 
he thought of publishing it in two stout 
volumes ; but the more he considered 
the subject, the more it grew under his 
hands, until finally it assumed a shape 
which it would have required a long 
lifetime to finish. It grew because from 
the first his method was liked. His 
power of teaching was so great that he 
could make the most complicated mat- 
ters perfectly simple. There were no 
blurred or obscure passages for the 
reader to stumble over. All was clear ; 
and it was amazing how much he could 
make clear, what knotty points he could 
simplify. His mind was like a wheel 
moving with uniform velocity, capable 
of crushing flints or egg-shells with equal 
ease. 



JOHK FISKE 45 

This lucidity we see in all Fiske's work, 
from tbe beginning to the end ; but it 
could only have been strengthened by 
his custom of reading his historical work 
in the form of lectures to people in 
many different parts of America. A 
man may publish a book that is thor- 
oughly unintelligible, but one who reads 
his work to the public is quick to per- 
ceive what his hearers may not compre- 
hend and he has the chance to correct 
it. Fiske, however, was clear without 
this enforced revision of his manuscript. 
His mind grasped events, and recorded 
them, not merely in their sequence, but 
also in their relation to one another, and 
they, being thus connected, held one 
another in place. He had a wonderful 
memory, but it was in a great meas- 
ure the product of his wonderful habit of 
classifying, of systematising, of arrang- 
ing every new acquisition, as some 
people always put away books, set 
papers in order, abhorring a litter. 



46 JOHN FISKE 

His dignified, slightly ponderous style 
expresses admirably his equable, judi- 
cial mind, which worked with great uni- 
formity, oline Hastj ohne Bast. Indeed, 
in its placid strength Fiske's style might 
well remind one — pace the German na- 
tion — of Goethe's. 

The encounter with his audiences, 
however, must have shown Fiske what 
the great public wanted to hear. He had 
not to conquer their indifference : he, as 
it were, took them by the hand, and 
began to expound even the most com- 
plicated series of events so simply and 
clearly that they were at once interested 
and eager to continue. His lectures 
seemed like pleasant walks with an ac- 
complished teacher. Their popularity 
was great. It might have seemed that 
the old day of lectures had wholly dis- 
appeared, but there exist always a num- 
ber of people who read more easily with 
their ears than with their eyes, and pre- 
fer seeing an author in the flesh to look- 



JOHK FISKB 47 

ing at his photograph. They demand 
that what they are to hear shall be put 
clearly before them, so that they can 
grasp it immediately ; and Fiske wrote 
clearly before he ever thought of lectur- 
ing. 

What began very modestly grew rap- 
idly. In 1881 he gave some historical 
lectures at the Washington University in 
St. Louis, and three years later he re- 
ceived a regular appointment as non- 
resident professor of history in that 
institution of learning. His duty was 
to give every year a series of lectures. 
These he would prepare at home dur- 
ing the summer months; setting forth in 
the autumn with a heap of fresh manu- 
script, and giving lectures in many 
different places on his way to and from 
St. Louis. 

In this way, between 1888 and 1893, 
he lectured five hundred and twenty- 
seven times on historical subjects, four- 
teen times on philosophy, six times on 



48 JOHN FISKE 

music. It would, indeed, be curious to 
know in how many different places he 
stopped even in this small part of the 
twenty years of which he spent so large 
a portion in wandering from Maine to 
the Pacific coast. 

He had discovered that it is only 
when used as a flavour in works of fiction 
that historical writing serves to support 
a man and a hungry family, but by this 
beneficent interposition of the lecture it 
enabled Fiske to live. It asked a high 
price, however, — enforced abstinence 
from work during the best working 
months, the fatigue of long journeys in 
the suffocating heat of the detestable rail- 
way cars, and strange gastronomic prob- 
lems. Fiske was strong and cheerful. 
He never complained of the discomforts : 
he remembered only the advantages of 
travel. No sociable person such as Fiske 
was could go about so much without 
learning many things not to be found in 
books, without coming across new ways 



JOHN FISKE 49 

of thought, new interests and ideals. 
He recalled rather the many sympa- 
thetic friends he made, with whom he 
shared his own wide interests and attain- 
ments. There must be those, for in- 
stance, in Portland, Oregon, who remem- 
ber the afternoon when he read the article 
which he had prepared upon Schubert 
for the Cyclopaedia of Music, illustrat- 
ing it with the master's songs. At all 
events, Fiske himself long remembered 
that happy day. 

Seeing a number of persons in dif- 
ferent parts of the country tends to pro- 
tect one from the ravages of narrow 
local prejudice. More than this, Fiske 
with his insatiable appetite for informa- 
tion picked up many odd bits of infor- 
mation, collected curious legends and 
traditions of great service to him. As 
for visiting places of historic interest, it 
requires no commendation. A battle- 
field explains itself better than a map, 
and so with the rest. Even from a car 



60 JOHN FISKE 

window one gets a more accurate idea of 
a prairie than from any description in a 
printed book. Experience of this sort 
— for few Americans have known Amer- 
ica so thoroughly as he — would have es- 
caped him if he had been shut up in a 
bookish corner. 



V. 

During the intervals between the lect- 
uring campaigns Fiske was constantly 
at his desk. He sat down early, and 
worked till late. His great strength, 
his sturdy constitution, enabled him to 
work steadily many hours a day and 
for many days in succession. He had 
never been an enthusiastic lover of ex- 
ercise, and year by year the amount 
that he could take grew less and less. 
From a slender sapling he grew larger 
and larger. Exercise became first dif- 
ficult and then impossible j but this only 
made his place at the desk dearer to him, 
and he worked only the harder. His 
uninterrupted good health was a treach- 
erous friend, for it persuaded him that 
he could live in defiance of the need of 
the rest and exercise which he knew in 
theory to be necessary. Behind him 
was the spur of necessity, before him in 
some uncertain future lay the large lei- 



52 JOHN FISKE 

sure whea lie should be able to carry 
out some of the plans of literary work 
that had haunted him almost from boy- 
hood; but on his desk lay the call for 
immediate work. This call he never 
neglected. 

The most prominent result of this 
work we behold in the series of histories 
which took the place of the modest hand- 
book he had at first hoped to write. 
The volumes took their shape almost by 
accident, to meet the desires of the pub- 
lishers and the interest of the public; 
aj)pearing piece-meal, as chance directed, 
not in chronological sequence. They all, 
however, fitted the place they were to 
occupy in the general work, and that is 
the only question of the slightest impor- 
tance. It was a large monument that 
Fiske meant to build, and though un- 
finished, it rose high enough to let us 
see the scope and significance of the plan 
that gradually formed itself in his mind. 
A work of that magnitude may be ex- 



JOH:Nr FISKE 11 

tells us, through Mr. Mead, that he en- 
joyed walking, riding, rowing, especially 
rowing, for which there was abundant 
opportunity at Middletown, lying as it 
does on the banks of the Connecticut 
River. He soon, however, became so 
enthusiastic a student — in his sixteenth 
year his average was twelve hours a 
day — that he must have abandoned 
these distractions. Later he studied 
even more intensely, and as long as he 
lived he was working almost all the 
time that he was awake ; but his great 
strength and mighty constitution en- 
abled him to do this with hardly a day^s 
illness. 

This sketch very briefly summarizes 
Fiske's early work, but it cannot fail to 
show the generous breadth of his intelli- 
gence and his love of learning. It is 
important also to notice that he was 
always busy classifying and co-ordinating 
what he had acquired. It was this 
orderly arrangement that gave him the 



12 JOHK FISKE 

command of his stores of information. 
He had a wonderful memory, but he did 
not dump facts into it: he placed them 
where they belonged, and thus formed 
a great scheme of knowledge, very fully 
furnished, where he could put his hand, 
when he wanted to do so, on any particu- 
lar fact. 

The ideal of such a scheme was 
obviously omniscience and, as saints 
have yearned for perfect virtue, so Fiske 
yearned to possess all learning. It is not 
for the present writer to compare his 
success with that of even the lowest of 
the saints, but Fiske certainly made a 
very good start and at a very early age 
towards acquiring a fairly complete 
knowledge of what information had been 
stored in the best books, and to this 
knowledge he was always adding. One 
may fall short of omnipotence and yet 
be powerful, so one may fail of omni- 
science and yet be learned. Too vast a 
mass of information sometimes proves 



JOHN FISKE 53 

pected not to be finished by the man who 
began it, but no man's work is finished. 

The nature of the historian's task has 
been the subject of much thought and 
possibly more discussion in these later 
days ; and, when the historians them- 
selves difi'er about the secrets of their art, 
it ill becomes the incomi^etent outsider 
to display his ignorance by undertaking 
to settle the whole question off-hand. 
There is no one rule for the historian's 
guidance, his is a complex art. At any 
given moment he appears to be chronicl- 
ing facts, or what may be taken for facts, 
in such a way as to attract the reader's 
attention to something else that the his- 
torian wants to impress upon him. If 
this is true of history, it is true of all 
literature and perhaps of all art : the 
writer, the artist, is setting his work in 
a new light, correcting in some way the 
work of his predecessors by addition or 
suppression or a different arrangement. 
For every generation there are some ques- 



64 JOHN FISKE 

tions that seem settled, there are some 
things that seem finished, like pyramid 
building and epic poetry. Though no 
one can be sure that both of these diver- 
sions may not be the rage before the end 
of the century, they are not now engross- 
ing the attention of students or of the gen- 
eral public. Everything else is in a state 
of flux. The fashions in poetry, in litera- 
ture of every sort, shift and change, not 
by chance, not from mere wantonness, 
but from the desire to make a more pre- 
cise statement than the last one heard. 
A man who can say a thing that is half 
tru or true half the time already de- 
serves a reputation as a sage, but the 
other half calls aloud for contradiction 
and the true half for a better statement. 
In history, at any rate, it is easy to 
see the various methods that have been 
tried by successive writers under the 
influence of the prevailing modes of 
thought ; and Fiske's work bears un- 
mistakable evidence of the time it was 



JOHN FISKE 55 

written, in the way in which every inci- 
dent is recorded in its relation to its 
causes. The cast of the author^ s thought, 
determined by his study of the theory 
of evolution, stamps every page. There 
are no life histories in his volumes : the 
generation before him had given that 
picturesque work abundant attention. 
Carlyle had impressed the French Eev- 
olution on countless readers by his vivid 
portraits of the leading actors. All his- 
tory he would have recounted in a hand- 
ful of brilliant biographies. In time 
this process cloyed. The reader tired 
of this dramatic, melodramatic fervour, 
and the fashion changed. How much 
the great man influences his time, and 
how much his time influences the great 
man, is as far from settlement as the 
priority of hen or egg, and of about the 
same importance. 

Living at the moment when vivid 
biography is the one way of conveying 
information, the historian inclines to 



66 JOHI^ FISKE 

show us thatj for example, tlie discovery 
of America is the result of the happy 
thought and heroic persistence of one 
man who wanders from court to court to 
persuade kings of the advantages of 
his wild scheme, proving that the world 
is round and that eggs can be balanced. 
On his voyage he alone has faith, and he 
stands on the lookout like the hero of 
an opera. We all know the method, and 
have felt its charm. Its success depends 
on bringing into vivid relief the admi- 
rable qualities of the hero, and it requires 
a very superior historian not to add a 
little to the height and difficulty of the 
obstacles his hero has to surmount. 

To one trained like Fiske to see in the 
movements of mankind not merely the 
force of individual action, but also those 
greater impulses that sweep through all 
society, the work of the historian was 
different. It became his duty to show 
not merely what things were done and 
who did them, but to make clear why 



JOHN FISKE 57 

they were done. N"ot]iing snows this 
difference of the two schools more clearly 
than his massive work on the discovery 
of America. There he makes clear that 
this important event was not the result 
of the fortuitous choice of one able and 
persistent man, but a step for which the 
whole civilized world had been long pre- 
paring. The event is set in its proper 
relation to the world's history, and yet 
without detriment to the fame of Chris- 
topher Columbus. The man's insistence 
and energy receive full credit at Fiske's 
hands. 

We see how the work was carried 
through by him in the face of the usual 
opposition : what is removed from his- 
tory is the aspect of caprice, of acciden- 
tal choice, which is exaggerated by in- 
sisting too earnestly on the individual 
portrait. To make that portrait vivid, 
it is necessary to diminish the * hero's 
dependence on anything but his own 
indomitable will. 



58 JOHN FISKE 

The fate of neither one of these 
methods of writing history is settled for 
all time : the pendulum will still swing, 
— some readers will yearn for perfect 
sympathy with the great men, and will 
suspect indifference in the writer who 
tries to show what influenced them. 
The absolute superiority of either will 
not be finally determined until the day 
when the question of the freedom of the 
will is settled. It only remains to be 
said that the method which shall be used 
at any given moment depends not on 
the choice of the author so much as on 
the general thought of the time. 

Whatever the future may have in 
store, for the present, at least, Fiske's 
method gives great delight and abun- 
dant Instruction. The broad general 
outlines which he draws are so clear, and, 
when he comes to filling in the detail, 
they have an air of fitting in their 
places so simply and naturally, that writ- 
ing a history appears to be the easiest 



JOHN FISKE 59 

thing in the world. Eeading history is 
certainly easy when it is Fiske who 
is the narrator. His learning is suffi- 
ciently obvious, although no one ever 
knew everything, and his power of 
orderly arrangement was shown when- 
ever he put pen to paper. What was 
still more remarkable was his absolute 
honesty, his earnest desire to be im- 
partial. If at any moment there had 
been shown to him the unsoundness of 
what he had written, he would not have 
hesitated to destroy what was wrong, 
and to replace it with what was right. 
He cared only for the truth, and while 
few avow a preference for falsehood, 
there are varieties in the respect paid to 
the truth. 

Such crystalline honesty as Fiske' s is 
something rare, and no one of his quali- 
ties ever impressed his friends more 
deeply than this one. He said a thing 
because he thought it true, he never 
thought a thing true because he had 



60 JOHN FISKE 

said it, and he was always glad to cor- 
rect an error. This frankness and guile- 
lessness he continually manifested in his 
daily life, where there generally pre- 
vails a shrewder worldly wisdom. Thus 
in the mishap of his reading in church, 
when he appealed to the august presi- 
dent of the college as one who would be 
sure to sympathise with his love of 
study and his indifference to religious 
formality, he displayed a simplicity that 
does not always mark the undergraduate 
at odds with the authorities, and this 
simplicity he retained throughout his 
life. He even carried it so far as to 
expect always to find the same direct- 
ness in others, and frequent disappoint- 
ment taught him no better. He was 
ever newly surprised and puzzled when 
he encountered anything else : it had 
the effect upon him of a painful dis- 
covery which threatened to disturb his 
cheery optimism. It did not, however, 
by any means uproot that quality in 



JOHN FISKE 61 

him : it only modified his opinion of 
those in whom he found it. For them 
he had no worse epithet than ^^ double- 
dealer," but that expressed very severe 
condemnation of those who said one 
thing and meant another. 

The qualities thus indicated in Fiske, 
his surprise at finding the world full 
of complications, do not mark him as 
what is called a practical man ; and a 
practical man he never became. His 
whole life was a long struggle with 
practical questions. He had a large 
family to bring up, and to accomplish 
this task, he was forced to work night 
and day ; and the harder he worked, the 
harder he had to work, until even his 
great strength failed him, and he died 
under sixty. 

This American history, as is well 
known, was his principal work. The 
volumes, as has been explained, grew 
from lectures ; and the choice of the 
period depended on very slight matters, 



62 JOHN* FISKE 

perhaps the region where he was asked : 
to lecture or the articles he was asked to 
write for some magazine. The subject 
once chosen, however, the book ran on i 
smoothly, as a watch goes on wherever 
the hands are set. Always his main j 
effort was not so much to add new facts j 
as to arrange those already acquired in \ 
such a way that readers might under- : 
stand why things happened as they did. 
This aim he did his best to make per- j 
fectly clear. Thus in his preface to The • 
Critical Period of American History , 1783 
-1789^ published in 1888, he says the j 
work ^^ makes no pretensions to com- 
pleteness, either as a summary of the ; 
events of that period or as a discus- 
sion of the political questions involved \ 
in them. I have aimed especially at i 
grouping facts in such a way as to bring i 
out and emphasise their causal se- ; 
quence, and it is accordingly hoped that j 
the book may prove useful to the | 
student of American history. '^ i 



JOfiN FISKB 63 

Three years later^ in the introduction 
to The American Bevolution^ he says the 
same thing, affirming that his ^^ design 
was not so much to contribute new facts 
as to shape the narrative in such a way 
as to emphasise relations of cause and ef- 
fect that are often buried in the mass of 
details.'^ This is indubitably one of the 
legitimate ways of writing history, and 
one which demands knowledge and judg- 
ment, to decide upon the relative impor- 
tance of different events and to deter- 
mine how they are related. It was this 
broad treatment that gave the charm to 
Fiske's histories, — this power of seeing 
things in masses, of seeing the forest 
without being bewildered by the trees. 
He had built himself a vast and orderly 
notion of the cosmos, and any subject 
that he happened to write about found 
its proportionate place in that large 
scheme. 

Some of these histories dealt with 
times and events that had been im- 



64 JOHN FISKE 

pressed to the point of satiety upon 
American readers. The foundation of 
'New England, the War of the Eevolu- 
tion, — was there anything left to say on 
these well-threshed subjects? The Pil- 
grim Fathers, the heroes of the Eevolu- 
tion, had never been left for a moment 
quiet in their graves. They were always 
marching in processions to teach us some 
part of their virtues 5 yet familiar and 
trite as their story had become, told 
as it was by Fiske, it appeared in a 
new light, with an unsuspected signifi- 
cance. 

He was himself surprised at the in- 
terest shown in his account of familiar 
events. In the preface of The American 
Eevolution he says, '*I was greatly sur- 
prised at the interest thus shown in a 
plain narrative of events already well 
known, and have never to this day un- 
derstood the secret of it.'' The reason 
is not so obscure to others. To Fiske it 
never occurred that his hearers and 



JOHN FISKE 65 

readers had hitherto contented them- 
selves with leaving bare facts lying 
about in their mind without trying to 
explain their connection. With him 
orderly arrangement was as natural as 
breathing. Intelligence, too, is in many 
ways so admirable a quality, it lends to 
a book so novel a charm, that it is hard 
to keep from wondering why readers 
are so tolerant of its absence. Fiske's 
intelligence so clarified and explained 
what he was writing about that the 
reader saw through his eyes, understood 
with his mind. 

The merit of his exposition was felt 
not only by chance readers but by 
experts alike. Thus General Greene's 
southern campaigns in the Eevolution- 
ary War are so well recounted in Fiske's 
history that General Sherman, after 
reading the book, asked the author 
where he had received his military edu- 
cation ; and General Sherman's good 
opinion was worth having. This was by 



66 JOHN FISKE 

no means the only tribute from com- 
petent judges to the quality of his work. 
A subtle objection may be made that it 
was popular, and, inasmuch as there is 
nothing more popular than vulgarity, it 
may be assumed that a repulsive ele- 
ment has crept into everything that 
has acquired popularity ; but such spe- 
cious arguments answer themselves. That 
Fiske's treatment of history was popu- 
lar cannot be doubted. The most ser- 
vile biographer will not attempt to 
deny that Fiske was guilty of this black 
crime. 

There is no one way in which alone 
history should be written, and no 
method, of course, which ensures suc- 
cess without regard to the man who em- 
ploys it. Those who disapproved of 
Fiske instinctively, tried to persuade 
themselves, and others, that it was be- 
cause he did not work in the archives, — 
as if that work, undoubtedly useful as it 
is, were the only thing worth praise. 



JOHN FISKE 67 

One is always glad of an excuse for hat- 
ing one's kind; and this excuse could 
serve as well as another, and always our 
condemnation of those we do not like is 
because they are not somebody else. 
Still there is something to be said in 
favour of the method which lets the 
store of information filter through an in- 
telligent mind on its way to the reader. 
The most solid objection to this plan is 
the difficulty of finding the intelligent 
mind. 

If the work in the archives was not 
what Fiske did, he worked indefati- 
gably in collecting material, and to the 
material that he accumulated he added 
great stores of outside information. The 
story he had to tell he presented clearly, 
often eloquently, and always in such a 
way as to exercise the reader in the art 
of thinking, — the reader thought with 
Fiske. He knew none of the agonies of 
composition. What he had to say was 
steadily and carefully thought out and 



68 JOHK FISKE i 

I 
steadily and carefully put down on paper, 1 

ready for the press. His manuscript i 

rivalled the neatest work of the type- j 

writer. Here and there a word was j 

changed, but this was seldom. His clear I 

thought made the expression clear. j 



VI. 

The most important of his histories is 
The Discovery of America, It certainly 
contains the richest mass of learning and 
deals with questions of greater scope 
than those of the rest of the series ; and 
the larger the subject, the more impres- 
sive was Fiske's treatment. Here he 
tells the story of the trade routes as it 
ought to be told, he discusses the doubt- 
ful case of the Norsemen with liberality, 
and, in a word, brings the discovery of 
America into its proper relation with 
the history of the world, which was his 
real task as an historian. His learning 
was most illuminating and various. I 
remember that, when he was correcting 
the proof-sheets of the first volume, I 
happened to have in my hand a com- 
plete synopsis of what was known about 
the early maps, — in a number of the 
Globus, I believe, — and I set about ex- 
amining him, to see if he knew all there 



70 JOHN FISKE 

was to be known about the subject. In 
case any omissions should be found, I 
was prepared, as I told him, to write a 
notice of the book in which it should be 
said that, while Mr. Fiske, to be sure, 
speaks of this and that map, it must 
have been only by some strange over- 
sight that he neglected the other, famil- 
iar of course to every school-boy ; but to 
my great disappointment he knew them 
all. 

When we talked of what one knows 
and what one does not know, he said, 
^^The only thing one really knows is 
what one has looked up for writing 
about, and then has been over in proof- 
sheets : the rest does not exist.'' But in 
that remark he was unjust to his own 
capacious memory which recalled the 
date in which perhaps half the houses 
of Cambridge were built, the weather of 
every day of remote years, conversation 
in the past, and, most astounding of all, 
the name and disposition of every hand- 



JOHK FISKE 71 

maiden who had been in the service of 
his household, the length of her stay, 
and the reason of her departure. To be 
exact, there was one person whose de- 
parture he could never account for. 
Though he knew it was of a harrowing 
kind, he could not recall the reason. 
When the reader reflects on the vicissi- 
tudes of domestic life in New England 
during a period of, say, thirty- five years, 
he will be able to appreciate the sturdi- 
ness of a memory like Fiske's. 

It was, indeed, most extraordinary, 
and manifested itself in many odd ways. 
Once I was with Fiske at a private ex- 
hibition given by a very expert con- 
jurer, who in the course of the enter- 
tainment offered himself for examination 
on various remote dates of modern 
history. He put his head into the lion's 
mouth. The rest of us, to be sure, had 
had vast sums spent on our education j 
but there were years in, say, the six- 
teenth century from which at the mo- 



72 JOHK FISKE 

ment it was impossible for us to draw 
the veil. Not so with Fiske. It was all 
to him like the day before yesterday, — 
the magician had met his match. His 
memory too was precise, he could quote 
whole pages from Dickens, and quote 
them accurately. 

His own solid text and the corrobora- 
tive foot-notes attest his wide knowledge 
and eager interests more satisfactorily 
than can the affirmations of his friends. 
This book, The Discovery of America^ 
bears witness to his careful study and 
to his freedom from prejudice. Take, 
for example, the discussion of the Norse- 
men and their alleged discovery of 
America. One may or may not agree 
with Fiske in his views of what is pos- 
sibly an idle legend, but one must ap- 
prove of the way he examines it with an 
open mind, without dogmatism. His 
treatment, too, of Americus Yespucius is 
most thorough and intelligent. It is 
the work of a master who handles with 



JOHK FISKE 73 

felicity a large subject. In this first 
volume Fiske was distinctly at his best. 
The magnitude of the questions involved 
called out his ablest work. His some- 
what massive style well suits the dignity 
of the historian. 

The volumes on the beginnings of 'New 
England, of Virginia, and of the Dutch 
and Quaker colonies, show what he 
would have liked to do for the whole 
country ; but the subject grew on his 
hands, and soon became too vast for any 
one man^s accomplishment. In one vol- 
ume he spoke of what to some are still 
recent events in his Mississippi Valley in 
the Civil War. This book, as he is care- 
ful to say in his preface, in no way be- 
longed to the general series which he 
was writing at the same time. It was 
rather produced in accordance with that 
mysterious principle which brings it 
about that most of the things done in 
this world are accomplished by men al- 
ready busy with something else. It is 



74 JOHN FISKE 

a military narrative of a certain part of 
the Civil War, with but the most meagre 
references to the general history of the 
time. The hook rose into being from a 
series of lectures that he gave in St. 
Louis, in one of his annual visits, in aid 
of the fund for building a monument to 
General Grant. This subject very nat- 
urally suggested itself. Fiske was build- 
ing his own monument to that distin- 
guished leader. 

It is a minor work, to be sure, but a 
very interesting one, with many capti- 
vating personal touches, such as his 
reports of conversations with persons 
concerned in those memorable events. 
Its main value, however, is the firm- 
ness of touch with which the story of 
complicated campaigns is set before the 
reader, so that he perceives the full sig- 
nificance of the whole movement and 
the meaning of each separate incident. 
The book was attacked for errors of 
detail, but we must remember that 



JOHI^ FISKE 75 

Fiske had already said in his preface: 
^^ In treating such a subject, . . . the dif- 
ficulties in ensuring complete accuracy 
of statement and perfect soundness of 
judgment are manifold. If my opin- 
ions are sometimes strongly expressed, 
they are always held subject to re- 
vision.'^ They were often strongly 
expressed : the blunders that prolonged 
the war he points out with great vivid- 
ness; but it is with equal vividness that 
he expounds the strategy that was 
hidden in what seemed a disorderly 
huddle of events, that he presents the 
progress of that great flanking move- 
ment. A great many people were in 
possession of the facts, but it would be 
hard to find anywhere so lucid an ex- 
position of what the facts meant and 
of their relation to one another. Take, 
for instance, the chapters about Yicks- 
burg, and notice how simply he points 
out why the capture of the city was 
important and what were the difficul- 



76 JOHN FISKE 

ties that Grant had to face. Here is 

an illuminating paragraph: 

^' In the densely populated countries 
of Europe an army can often subsist 
upon the country through which it 
marches, but this was seldom the case 
with our armies in the Southern States. 
Their food and ammunition had to be 
brought to them, and it was seldom pos- 
sible for them to move more than a few 
miles from the line by which such sup- 
plies were brought. As Wellington 
once said, every army moves, like a ser- 
pent, upon its belly ; and the clumsiness 
of such kind of movement, under the 
conditions which obtained in our Civil 
War, may best be illustrated by a little 
arithmetic. The weight of food, ammu- 
nition, and other supplies required by 
each soldier averaged 4 pounds daily. 
A single wagon, therefore, carrying a 
load of 2,000 pounds and dragged over 
bad roads by six mules or draught 
horses, would supply 500 men, provided 



JOHN FISKE 77 

it could make the trip both ways 
between the army and its base on the 
same day. If the army were one day's 
march from its base, so that the wagon 
must come one day and return em^Dty 
the next, it could only supply 500 men 
every alternate day, or 250 daily. If 
the army were two days^ march from 
its base, the wagon could only furnish 
supplies at the rate of 125 men daily, 
or 4 wagons to 250 men. To supply an 
army of 50,000 men, therefore, at two 
days' march from its base, required 400 
wagons. Such an army ordinarily had 
at least 8,000 horses for its cavalry and 
artillery, and each of these animals 
consumed 25 pounds of forage daily, 
which made a load for just another 400 
wagons. These 800 wagons were drawn 
by 4, 800 mules or draught horses, which 
in turn required 180 wagons to carry 
their forage. These 180 wagons were 
drawn by 1, 080 animals which were fed 
by 48 wagons, and so on. Adding the 



78 JOHN FISKE 

figures, we fiud that for such au army 
as Grant had in Mississippi in Decem- 
ber, 1862, nearly 1,100 wagons, drawn 
by 6, 600 animals, were needed to keep 
it supplied at two days' march from its 
base ; while at three days' march 
nearly 1,900 wagons, drawn by 11,000 
animals, were requisite. Such an army 
could not travel more than two or three 
days without shifting its base along the 
line of some railroad or river ; and 
obviously this movable base must be 
securely connected by river or rail with 
some permanent base established in a 
region entirely under Federal control. 
We thus get a realizing sense of the 
prodigious importance of railroads in 
our Civil War. Had the rebellion 
occurred a few years earlier, before our 
long lines of railroad had been built, 
its suppression by military means would 
have b3en physically impossible.'' — The 
Mississippi Valley in the Civil War^ p. 
191, et seq. 



JOHK FISKE 79 

All this is so simple and obvious that, 
when our attention is called to it, we feel i 

as if we had known it all our lives, and j 

that our knowledge was shared by all \ 

our acquaintance; but, in fact, it is the j 

ability to point out these things, so often | 

forgotten, that thoroughly justifies a < 

man in writing a book. This is but one 
example, chosen almost at random, of ; 

Fiske's constant habit. It seems as if he 
could have said nothing else, but those - 

who have read many books will under- 
stand how rare is the gift of saying what | 
one wants to know. 



VII. 

"Whatever may have been the errors 
of detail, they were, as Fiske said, sub- 
ject to revision. Unfortunately, he died 
before he could examine anew the ques- 
tions brought up, but those who knew 
him will feel sure that he would have 
looked over the evidence solely with an 
eye to getting the truth, not at all with 
a desire to exculpate himself if he was 
wrong. He was far above that low 
solicitude for himself: he loved the 
truth. If at any moment he had been 
convinced that his views about evolution, 
for example, were wrong, he would have 
abandoned them without hesitation, and 
he would have made his recantation as 
public as his adherance. He lacked 
that false pride which leads men to hug 
their blunders, to dread apologies as if 
they were proofs of cowardice. His 
friends knew his crystalline honesty, his 
lack of self-seeking, his perfect frank- 



JOHN FISKE 81 

ness. His enemies, too, knew his frank- 
ness ; and while we all admire the 
virtue, it seems to degenerate into vio- 
lence when it expresses views we do not 
ourselves hold. His opponents would 
have sometimes preferred to have his dis- 
sent more hidden, but those who had 
any serious matter to discuss with him 
had no cause for complaint. He was 
intolerant only of prejudice and ignor- 
ance when they became dogmatic. On 
such occasions he did not disguise his 
emphatic disapproval where others 
might have hinted a possible divergence 
of opinion; but Fiske's mind did not 
work by hints. He was more inclined 
to strike straight from the shoulder, and 
the straight line in such matters is in no 
better credit than is the straight line in 
the new geometry. 

In his notes to his histories his ex- 
planations and illustrations are fre- 
quently conversational in tone, and he 
gives very free expression to his views on 



82 JOHN FISKE 

morals and politics, with little touches 
that reveal his tastes and character. 
They are often unconventional enough in 
matter as well as in manner, and so attract 
attention in a country where divergence 
of opinion is rare, where an independent 
thinker is looked upon as an eccentric, 
and the discussion of many serious sub- 
jects is put down either by the quiet 
boycott or by pressure. What he said 
was innocent enough j but, when every 
one is whispering, a speaking voice 
sounds loud. 

Yet, though he very often differed from 
the prevailing view, it was amiably 
and cheerfully and with unfailing opti- 
mism. He never despaired of the re- 
public or of anything else. No one was 
ever less disposed to gloom, but his 
cheerfulness by no means made him 
approve of the faults or blunders of 
contemporary life : these he condemned, 
but he felt sure that time would infalli- 
bly correct them. Evolution had done 



JOHX FISKE 83 

so mucli that it could not fail to do more. 
Fiske's hopefulness lay deep, his philos- 
ophy abode with him always and was 
manifested in all of his work. It was 
part of his nature. It fostered his natural 
tendency to arrange facts in an orderly 
manner and to explain as well as to nar- 
rate. We see it especially prominent 
in the four little volumes {The Destiny 
of Man J The Idea of God, Through Nature 
to Gody and Life Everlasting) in which he 
discusses the most serious questions and 
the most unanswerable that man asks of 
life. They form almost a series by them- 
selves. The one that expounds Darwin- 
ism {The Destiny of Man viewed in the 
Light of his Origin) is a model of expo- 
sition, a brief compendium that can 
hardly fail to delight a mature reader 
and yet would be perfectly clear to an 
intelligent child with a few definitions 
of the terms employed. 

In the other volumes he treats sub- 
jects on which he had thought much. 



84 JOHN FISKE 

They make us regret that he never 
found the time to write the life of Christ 
that had always haunted him as a pos- 
sible and interesting thing to do. He 
had made some preliminary sketches in 
the early seventies, but these had soon 
been abandoned ; and Fiske never had 
leisure to keep up his studies in this 
subject. 

He would have had here a most ex- 
cellent opportunity to combine history 
and philosophy, and he would have 
written an interesting and important 
book. The subject especially attracted 
him both as an investigator and as a 
thinker ; and although the announce- 
ment of the book from his pen would 
have filled some with shivering horror, 
the book itself would scarcely have had 
so lamentable an effect. How deep was 
his religious feeling is now clearly mani- 
fest in much of his work, a great deal 
more testifies to his endeavour to be im- 
partial in the treatment of historic ques- 



JOHN FISKE 85 

tions, and we kuow what an amount of 
general information lie would have been 
able to devote to throwing light upon the 
subject. More than this, he would have 
brought to the preparation of the book 
an open mind, a reverent spirit, and the 
absence of any desire to prove one thing 
or another. 

A very complete notion of Fiske's at- 
titude concerning the basis of religion 
and the belief in immortality may be 
got froir the four little volumes just re- 
ferred to. His simple nature was full 
of reverence, and the hopefulness of his 
temperament helped to make his mes- 
sage a cheerful one. 

The hasty notion that evolution was 
a dangerous and atheistic theory had 
already faded from men's minds more 
rapidly than do most utterly groundless 
notions. What had been synonymous 
with all that is mischievous and false 
was now seen not to be so black as it 
was painted. The victory was won. 



86 JOHN nSKE 

The victory indeed seemed to be won by 
both sides. Eeligion appeared to be 
more firmly established than ever, and 
the new philosophy had acquired gen- 
eral recognition. This is stating it too 
mildly, for the evolutionary theory, after 
making its way into physical science, 
had taken possession of the history of 
politics, of literature, of art, and finally 
was uniting even with its old foe, the- 
ology, in the study of early religions and 
the investigation of the Biblical books. 
While it had thus taken hold of ad- 
vanced thought, it had also become 
known to the general public, who no 
longer feared its methods. To this 
agreeable harmony Fiske had greatly 
contributed. His persistent teaching 
had borne fruit, and the world under the 
instruction of many teachers had come 
round to an exacter comprehension 
of what evolution really was. Fiske' s 
progress to the views he utters in these 
brief addresses had been to him only one 



JOHN FISKB 87 

of natural growth, but to some who had 
observed less closely it seemed as if he 
had undergone a great change of heart. 
He himself felt that his later views were 
expressed or implied in everything that 
he had published. There was no cata- 
clysm, no revelation of truth: he was 
merely better understood. 

And he had certainly become better 
known. Ten years before he died, his 
reputation was established. His books 
and lectures had given his name great 
prominence. He spoke then with ripe- 
ness of years and abundance of knowl- 
edge, as a man of authority. Honours 
had begun to fall upon him. People 
wrote to him from all quarters of the 
globe with questions of many sorts 
about this world and the next, — a sure 
token of his eminence, but of all the 
forms artfully assumed by flattery per- 
haps the least alluring. After long ob- 
scurity his worth shone out. Honorary 
degrees were frequently bestowed upon 



8S JOHN FISKE 

him: lie received the tokens of general 
respect for a well-spent life. He was 
invited to deliver an address at the 
millennial King Alfred celebration in 
England. The recognition of his merit 
was general. In the last few months of 
his life he was especially happy in ar- 
ranging his large collection of books on 
the walls of a new house that he was 
about to occupy, and where he hoped 
to continue his workj but this was not 
to be. 

The hot weather of 1901 came on, and 
of the great heat Fiske had become in- 
tolerant. His sedentary life, the very 
strength which so long enabled him 
to work in defiance of hygienic laws, 
his vast bulk growing with the im- 
possibility of exercise, his indifference 
to dietary laws, — all these things con- 
spired to unfit him for resistance to 
the depressing heat. He was in Cam- 
bridge when it began; but he found 
himself less and less able to stand up 



JOHN FISKE 89 

uDder it, and with one of his sons he 
started for East Gloucester to seek a 
breath of coolness on the edge of the 
sea. The change was useless, however. 
He reached the hotel, lay down, and in 
a few hours passed quietly away. This 
was July 4, 1901, in his sixtieth year. 



YIII. 

This was, then, a life devoid of incident, 
as that of a writer may well be. It 
was one of practically uninterrupted in- 
tellectual work. He began by amassing 
information, and this he continued doing 
until his last day. It is the use he 
made of this information, and the use he 
made of the intelligence born with him 
that rendered his life important. In 
the course of his career he wrote on a 
great variety of subjects; for his inter- 
ests were many, and at any time he 
would gladly have devoted himself to 
the further investigation of some branch 
of learning that he was compelled by 
other work to lay down. Early in his 
career he would have studied philology, 
comparative mythology and folk-lore, 
later the history of religions; but cir- 
cumstances forbade. 

How multiform were these interests 
one may see by turning to the volumes 



JOHK FISKE 91 

of miscellaneous essays. These are all 
well written and full of fine scholarship. 
Some were written so long ago that they 
have become to a certain extent obso- 
lete j but their method is not obsolete, 
nor has it become trite from over- use. 
In all of them we can see Fiske's mind 
working with its usual thoroughness, ad- 
mirably judicial and temperate. There 
is a wide range of subject, for Fiske's 
interests roamed over a large space; and 
besides those devoted to science there 
are two or three on distinctly literary 
matters, like that on Longfellow^ s transla- 
tion of Dante. For literature his busy 
life left him but little leisure ; but he 
read what he could, and that was a great 
deal. 

In the volume entitled Darwinism^ and 
Other Essays, are two papers on Educa- 
tion, written in 1866 and 1868 respec- 
tively, when the question began to be 
discussed anew, with results that we can 
see ; and Fiske's contributions are inter- 



92 JOHN FISKE 

esting and, in their main principles, as j 
well worth present study as when theyi! 
were written. It is still true, even if at'1 
times it is forgotten, that ^Ho teach thei 
student how to think for himself, andj 
then to give him the material to exer- ; 
cise his thought upon, — this is the whole i 
duty of a university,'' and that ^^it isj 
desirable that our opinions should be J 
correct, but it is far more desirable that i 
they should be arrived at independently j 
and maintained with intelligence and> 
candour. . . . Our motto should be, ■ 
Think the truth as far as possible, but, j 
above all things, think." Time has not ; 
yet made this lesson trite. ; 

The essay on the Oratorio of St. j 
Peter by Fiske's intimate friend, Mr. ; 
J. K. Paine, shows his interest in music \ 
as well as his knowledge of the art. ; 
The pages on Schubert, already men- • 
tioned, are such as only a music- lover 
could write, and he was really musical. \ 
While he was writing his Cosmic Fhilo- \ 



JOHX FISKE 93 

sophy, he composed a mass and set songs 
to music not without success. As often 
as he could find the time, he would go 
to a concert or to an oratorio. When at 
work, he would stroll to a piano in an- 
other room, play a little, and then go 
back refreshed to his desk. In talking 
about music, he would go to the piano 
and illustrate what he had to say by 
what we may call practical quotation. 
In short, he was a man of many gifts, 
who could have made his mark in many 
different ways, while the course his life 
took was directed almost as much by ac- 
cident as if he had been a hero of fiction. 
No hero of fiction was ever more richly 
endowed with virtues than was Fiske 
with the fruits of study. There are so 
many things that he could have done, 
but he was not free to choose what he 
would do : he had to do the work that 
was asked of him, and it gave him pleas- 
ure to do it, to his readers it gave pleas- 
ure and much more, so that after all the 



94 JOHN FISKE 

blame must be laid on the shortness of 

human life. 

With more leisure he would have 
done other things well, because, besides 
being well-equipped, he was by nature 
a born teacher ; that is to say, a man 
whose words were valuable not merely 
by reason of their accuracy, but on ac- 
count of the illumination and inspira- 
tion that came from his mind, from his 
enthusiasm, from his interest in his 
work. It is this inspiriug quality that 
marks the good teacher. The man who 
has it can make the Sanskrit alphabet 
interesting, while the one who lacks it 
will make a play of Aristophanes heavier 
than a French classic tragedy. Precision 
will not give this feeling, — if it did, we 
should draw emotion from the multipli- 
cation table, — the emotion comes from 
something else. 

In Fiske's work it is not glowing en- 
thusiasm that moves the reader, it is not 
eloquence in defending one side and 



JOHN FISKE 95 

denouncing the other (for he is singu- 
larly impassive and impersonal), there 
is no appeal of literary art (though the 
art is there), no ^^fiue writing." It is 
not a literary charm, but the personal 
intelligent earnestness of the writer, that 
moves us. We never think that this or 
that is well done, such or such a page is 
eloquent or touching, we are never com- 
pelled to admire the writer's skill. Far 
from it, his style is an almost transparent 
medium between his mind and whatever 
intelligence we may have. We look 
through it as we look through clear 
glass ; and, though it is true that glass is 
often admired for its glistening opalesc- 
ence or for its purple tints, yet clear 
glass has its merits. 

As has been noted by moralists, the 
style often indicates the man ; and in 
Fiske's case the statement is markedly 
true. In his comment on the Cosmic 
Fhilosophy Mr. Eoyce speaks of the ab- 
sence of any break between Fiske's boy- 



96 joh:^^ fiske 

hood and his maturity, and this remark 
accurately defines a most noticeable 
quality of Fiske' s character which is 
distinctly reflected in his clear, imper- 
sonal style. It impresses us by its sin- 
cerity, as he impressed those who knew 
him by his simplicity and sincerity, his 
most marked qualities. One does not 
notice whether his work has literary 
charm or not: one is simply interested 
and carried on by the smoothly running 
narrative. He interested every one, for 
the quality that all can appreciate is 
clearness. He saw things in masses, he 
lifted heavy weights easily, and with 
the strength he had the simplicity of a 
giant. He was devoid of guile. Till his 
last day he remained a great, simple, 
learned child. Other men are born with, 
or soon acquire, the art of grappling 
with this wicked world. Fiske could 
grapple better with a great pile of 
books. No one could look upon that 
beaming smile, into those clear eyes, 



JOHN FISKE 97 

without seeing the man's utter honesty ; 
and while other men have been, and 
some still are, honest, few have kept 
the virtue so untarnished as did Fiske. 
With him it was not merely an agreeable 
trait, but an active quality that possessed 
him, that filled his whole being. To 
carry honesty to that pitch requires a 
simple and unworldly nature. 

A man who neglects to exercise a very 
rigid control over his virtues obviously 
runs a risk of finding them overwhelm 
him, and Fiske was the victim of his own 
good qualities. Simplicity and sincerity 
are but a small part of the equipment of 
a man who conquers the world, although 
they have other advantages. 

Like every hard worker, he left his 
work half done. His history of America 
he never completed, but the story will be 
told over and over again. Many a good 
man will recount the growth of the 
nation in one way or another, and at 
times the world will be able to read it 



98 JOHN FISKE 

in an interesting form. Then they will 
know what so many of his contemporaries 
found in Fiske's historical work. At 
other times there will be an accumula- 
tion of details, a massing of documents, 
the busy collection of the materials of 
history, and scorn for the smooth recital. 
Those who enjoy that fashion will under- 
stand the feelings of those who look 
down with disapproval on Fiske's his- 
tories. To him, however, will always 
belong the credit of introducing into 
American history the historical method. 
He preached and practised this form of 
intellectual study, which is at present 
found to be the most fruitful, and the 
value of his teaching can be scarcely 
overrated. 

To have left a mark in the history 
of philosophy and to have helped to ex- 
pound the philosophy of history is a 
noble work for one life. His work, too, 
was of so high an order, so intelligent, so 
well prepared, that praise fits it very 



JOHN FISKE 99 

easily. He did not forget his favourite 
motto, — Vive ut eras moriturus, disee ut 
semper victurus, — he studied as if he were 
to live forever. He was never over- 
whelmed by his learning. In managing 
his solid acquirements, his mind was 
nimble. He never had the flashing per- 
ception that saw at a glance and defined 
with a word. He approached a question 
with some formality, sailed round it with 
a certain three-masted dignity, not illu- 
minating with a touch, but rather inter- 
preting what he had carefully amassed 
about a subject and deliberately weighing 
all the evidence. In the treatment of the 
bulky mass he was perfectly at ease. He 
made no pedantic display of his learning 
because it was impossible for him to 
make a display of any kind. His learn- 
ing illustrated and explained what he had 
to say. It formed part of his large way 
of thinking and looking at things. 

The man that we see in his books is 
the man as he lived. There are writers 



100 JOHN FISKE 

whose relation to their work is very 
puzzling. In the flesh they are only 
poor weak human beings, rather below 
the average in intelligence, so far as one 
may judge from a glance or even from 
prolonged examination ; but, when they 
once get a pen in their hand, they are 
new creatures, as different from their 
apparent selves as the butterfly from the 
crawling caterpillar. Those who are 
wise in their books are at times singularly 
devoid of wisdom in their lives and 
talk. Others again show themselves in 
their books as we know them, and to 
this class belonged John Fiske. He was 
what his books showed him to be, 
honest, simple, sincere. His absolute 
sincerity, his lack of guile, his freedom 
from moodiness, from uneasy vanity and 
self-consciousness, was always manifest. 
He was full of sympathy for others, and 
glad to demand it for himself. His in- 
domitable cheerfulness he tempered with 
wisdom. 



JOH:Nr FISKE 101 

In conversation he was one of the most 
delightful of men. He had no small 
talk, — the paltry substitute for the real 
thing, the copper change of the nobler 
conversation, — but he had abundance of 
real talk. He would wind deep into a 
subject, bring to its discussion valuable 
matter from the stores of his learning, 
and would frame and follow most in- 
genious hypotheses with wit and wisdom. 
He was of so large and healthy a make 
bodily and mentally, — a strong mind in 
a strong body, — with such immense men- 
tal energy, that he was interested in many 
different directions. His writings show 
this, but his talk showed it even more 
clearly. There he indicated possibilities 
of future work that were compelled to 
remain mere day-dreams. To complain 
of that, however, would be to complain 
of life ; and that is something Fiske 
would never have permitted. He 
thought better of the world than that, 
and we who look at his life have to 



102 JOHN FISKE 

lament no promise unfulfilled, no oppor- 
tunities wasted : rather we recall untiring 
energy and admirable performance. He 
began life with high aims ; and to these 
he remained constantly true, working 
steadily for thirty-five years, with un- 
varying devotion to his honourable 
task. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY. 

The standard editions of the works of 
John Fiske are published by Houghton, 
Mifflin & Company, Boston, in twenty- 
eight volumes. The same house has also 
recently published by subscription a uni- 
form edition in twenty-four volumes. 
In addition to these works a number of 
essays posthumously collected are pub- 
lished by the Macmillan Company under 
the title of Essays^ Historical and Literary 
(2 volumes), and Ginn & Company have 
published two brief volumes of an ele- 
mentary nature under the titles How the 
United States Became a Nation and The 
Discovery and Colonization of North Amer- 
ica. The material in these last two vol- 
umes represents Mr. Fiske' s prelude and 
conclusion to an abridgment of Irving' s 
Life of Washington edited by him which 
was published in 1887 by Ginn & Com- 
pany under the title Washington and his 
Country, 



104 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Especially worthy of attention is the 
Introduction to Mr. Fiske's Outlines of 
Cosmic Philosophy^ written by Professor 
Eoyce for the new edition of this work, 
as published in the uniform edition above 
mentioned. 

While awaiting the publication of the 
exhaustive biography which has been 
announced as in preparation, the reader 
must turn to periodical literature for 
further details concerning the life and 
work of Mr. Fiske. The articles thus 
to be found are numerous, but for the 
present purpose it seems only necessary 
to indicate a few of the more compre- 
hensive titles. These are : — 

I. The Christian Begister, April and May, 
1886. ^'John Fiske and his Philoso- 
phy.'' By Edwin D. Mead. An im- 
portant contribution, since much of the 
information was supplied by Mr. Fiske 
himself, giving the article great autobi- 
ographic value. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 105 

II. Earvard Graduates^ Magazine^ Sep- 
tember, 1901. "John Fiske as a 
Thinker." By Josiah Eoyce. 

III. Harvard Graduates'' Magazine^ Sep- 
tember, 1901. "The Life of John 
Fiske." By William E. Thayer. 

IV. International Monthly, October, 1901. 
"The Historical Services of John 
Fiske." By Albert Bushnell Hart. 

V. Education^ February, 1902. "John 
Fiske: An American Scholar." By 
Frank Waldo. 

YI. Proceedings of the American Antiqua- 
rian Society, Worcester, 1902. New Se- 
ries Vol. 14, " Eeminiscences of John 
Fiske." By Samuel S. Green. 

VII. Education, 'DecembeT,1901. "John 
Fiske as a School-boy." By F. W. 
Osborn. 

VIII. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1902. 
"John Fiske: An Appreciation." By 
Thomas S. Perry. 



The beacon BIOGRAPHIES. 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE, Editor, 



The aim of this series is to furnish brief, read- 
able, and authentic accounts of the lives of those 
Americans whose personalities have impressed 
themselves most deeply on the character and 
history of their country. On account of the 
length of the more formal lives, often running 
into large volumes, the average busy man and 
woman have not the time or hardly the inclina- 
tion to acquaint themselves with American bi- 
ography. In the present series everything that 
such a reader would ordinarily care to know is 
given by writers of special competence, who 
possess in full measure the best contemporary 
point of view. Each volume is equipped with 
a frontispiece portrait, a calendar of important 
dates, and a brief bibliography for further read- 
ing. Finally, the volumes are printed in a form 
convenient for reading and for carrying handily 
in the pocket, 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers. 



The beacon BIOGRAPHIES 

The following volumes are issued: 

Louis Agassiz, by Alice Bache Gould. 
John James Audubon, by John Burroughs. 
Edwin Booth, by Charles Townsend Copeland. 
Phillips Brooks, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. 
John Brown, by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. 
Aaron Burr, by Henry Childs Merwin. 

James Fenimore Cooper, by w. B. Shubrick Clymer.J 

Stephen Decatur, by Cyrus Townsend Brady. 

Frederick Douglass, by Charles W. Chesnutt. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Frank B. Sanborn. 
David G. Farragut, by James Barnes. 
John Fiske, by Thomas Sergeant Perry. 
Ulysses S. Grant, by Owen Wister. 

Alexander Hamilton, by James Schouler. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Mrs. James T. Fields. 
Father Hecker, by Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr. 
Sam Houston, by Sarah Barnwell Elliott. 

** Stonewall " Jackson, by Carl Hovey. 

Thomas Jefferson, by Thomas E. Watson. 

Robert E. Lee, by William P. Trent. 

Henry W. Longfellow, by George Rice Carpenter. 

James Russell Lowell, by Edward Everett Hale Tr 

Samuel F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge. 

Thomas Paine, by Ellery Sedgwick. 

Daniel Webster, by Norman Hapgood. 

Walt Whitman, by Isaac Hull Platt. 

John Greenleaf Whittier, by Richard Burton. 



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